Sherrington: If Hamilton wants reason for boos, he ought to look in the mirror

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Texas left fielder Josh Hamilton is pictured after striking out to end the eighth inning in the Orioles 5-1 victory during their American League wild card playoff MLB baseball game at Rangers Ballpark in Arlington on October 5, 2012.

The following are highlights from Kevin Sherrington’s Tuesday column. Come back later tonight to read it in full.

As any superstar comes to realize, no matter how much he thrills, fans always want more. They wanted more records off Babe Ruth’s big bat, more bodies in Jim Brown’s wake, more air under Michael Jordan’s feet.

If you hit two home runs in your first two times up, they want three. If you hit four, they want four more the next day.

They want these feats, yes, but they don’t demand them. No lucid fan does, anyway. The rest are not to be taken seriously.

What fans of any persuasion have a right to ask, however, is effort. They want to know you’re giving it your best every day. For all his pyrotechnics, Josh Hamilton couldn’t always make a convincing case that he cared as much as they did.

He’s played hurt, but he’s not a grinder in any sense of the word. Nor is he a student of the game. He has a great and perhaps unparalleled gift, for which he’s truly grateful, but not so much that he might try to embellish it.

The impression he left about his approach to the game in Texas was that his sheer genius should suffice for the days when he couldn’t provide an encore, or, more to the point, wasn’t up to the effort.

And that impression is why fans at the Ballpark booed him a couple of times. They didn’t scatter jeers in a July loss to the White Sox because he struck out twice. They didn’t boo in the wild card loss to the Orioles because he made four outs on eight pitches.

They didn’t boo because Dallas is “not a true baseball town,” as Hamilton claimed Sunday.

They booed because he sometimes looked like he didn’t care enough.

Of course, he’s interpreted two cases of boos to mean something else entirely, and what that is isn’t exactly clear. He told CBS 11 that Texas’ fans had generally been supportive, but the club’s success the last three years “spoiled” them. He also made a vague reference as to the nature of true baseball fans.

The next day, he tried to clarify his comments to the Orange County Register:

I said there’s true baseball fans and then there are others who are not. I said the ones that are true baseball fans won’t boo when I come back, and the ones that are not, will. . . . You understand the Yankees, Boston, Cubs, Phillies – baseball towns. If they were doing that, that’s one thing.

Let’s get this straight: True baseball fans apparently don’t boo, but they could if they wanted to.

No, Dallas is not a baseball town, not like New York, Boston, Chicago and Philadelphia. You could add St. Louis and San Francisco, too.

But if Hamilton made some of the excuses in New York, Boston and Chicago that he did here, he’d have been booed, all right, and more than twice.